James Fallows: China Airborne
China Airborne
Buch
- The Test of China's Future
- Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 02/2013
- Einband: Kartoniert / Broschiert
- Sprache: Englisch
- ISBN-13: 9781400031276
- Bestellnummer: 9647466
- Umfang: 288 Seiten
- Copyright-Jahr: 2013
- Gewicht: 218 g
- Maße: 203 x 131 mm
- Stärke: 22 mm
- Erscheinungstermin: 26.2.2013
Achtung: Artikel ist nicht in deutscher Sprache!
Kurzbeschreibung
In China Airborne, James Fallows documents, for the first time, the extraordinary scale of China's aerospace project, making clear how it stands to catalyze the nation's hyper-growth and hyper-urbanization, revolutionizing China in ways analogous to the building of America's transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century.Rezension
"That is the new book by James Fallows. On the surface it is a book about aviation in China, but it is also one of the best books on China (ever), one of the best books on industrial organization in years, and an excellent treatment of economic growth. It is also readable and fun." - Tyler Cowen"Not only does the book benefit from Fallows' keen observations as a journalist in China, but also it is enriched by his technical knowledge as a passionate aviator. The result is informative and lively." - The Economist
"What sets China Airborne apart from other books on China's rise is Fallows' remarkable ability to analyze both China's unprecedented achievements in economic modernization and its inherent limitations. . . . The story so brilliantly told in China Airborne , a metaphor for the much bigger story of China's rise, suggests that no one should take its future as a superpower for granted." - San Francisco Chronicle
"It is worth the reader's time to obtain it and read it. It is a timely look at a country in a newly dangerous economic and political situation. Understanding that situation is of utmost importance to the rest of the world." - Asia Sentinel
"Fallows has an earthy, engaging style, and he sees the human stories of government officials, entrepreneurs, workers and intellectuals all pursuing the dreams they have for themselves and their country as they take off together into the skies...The book is accessible in different ways to different people. Sinologists and aviation geeks like me will happily pore through Mr. Fallows' detailed endnotes, trapped at the back where they won't bother casual readers. People looking for a grab buy at the airport will find something light that will also make them think. Businesspeople, students, or tourists going to China can pick this up and get a good grip on the Chinese zeitgeist." - Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
"Fallows keeps the reader engaged by weaving personal stories and lively personalities into his depiction of the changing aerospace landscape...his book makes for an intriguing read, looking at both sides of the picture: reasons for why China might succeed, as well as those for why the country might struggle." - Publishers Weekly
"Prescient. . . . Highly readable and significant, Fallows' book should not be missed by those seeking to understand America's relationship with this global power." - Booklist , starred review
"Precise yet accessible. . . . An enjoyable, important update on an enigmatic economic giant." - Kirkus
"Will China change the 21st century, or be changed by it? China Airborne describes a country ambitiously soaring to fantastic new heights even as its destination remains perilously uncertain. James Fallows reports elegantly on the puzzles and paradoxes of this massive nation and its quest for global prominence." - Patrick Smith, author of Somebody Else's Century
"James Fallows has found a brilliant metaphor for China, and he is uniquely qualified to unspool the tale. Based on years of firsthand experience on the ground in China - and in cockpits around the world - this book showcases his gifts for deep reporting and analysis. Fallows doesn't simply bear witness; he unravels and dissects. For this vast country to achieve a leading role in the aerospace industry, it must attain standards of innovation, efficiency and precision that would signal a new era in the rise of a superpower. Has it attained that level? There is no better writer to find the answer, and Fallows has done it." - Evan Osnos, contributor to The New Yorker
"In China Airborne , Fallows tells the story of China's efforts to become a global leader in aviation and aerospace, a story that reveals the economic and political tensions in contemporary China. China's past economic success has been built on a combination of massive investment and labor force mobilization - what Fallows calls "hard" economic power and autocratic political control. But success in aerospace, li
Klappentext
From one of our most influential journalists, here is a timely, vital, and illuminating account of the next stage of China's modernization-its plan to rival America as the world's leading aerospace power and to bring itself from its low-wage past to a high-tech future.In 2011, China announced its twelfth Five-Year Plan, which included the commitment to spend a quarter of a trillion dollars to jump-start its aerospace industry. In China Airborne, James Fallows documents, for the first time, the extraordinary scale of China's project, making clear how it stands to catalyze the nation's hyper-growth and hyper-urbanization, revolutionizing China in ways analogous to the building of America's transcontinental railroad in the nineteenth century.
Completing this remarkable picture, Fallows chronicles life in the city of Xi'an, home to 250, 000 aerospace engineers and assembly-line workers, and introduces us to some of the hucksters, visionaries, entrepreneurs, and dreamers who seek to benefit from China's pursuit of aeronautical supremacy. He concludes by explaining what this latest demonstration of Chinese ambition means for the United States and for the rest of the world-and the right ways for us to respond.
Auszüge aus dem Buch
INTRODUCTIONThe flight to Zhuhai
In the fall of 2006, not long after I arrived in China, I was the copilot on a small-airplane journey from Changsha, the capital of Hunan province near the center of the country, to Zhuhai, a tropical settlement on the far southern coast just west of Hong Kong.
The plane was a sleek-looking, four-seat, propeller-driven model called the Cirrus SR22, manufactured by a then wildly successful start-up company in Duluth, Minnesota, called Cirrus Design. Through the previous five years, the SR22 had been a worldwide commercial and technological phenomenon, displacing familiar names like Cessna and Piper to become the best-selling small airplane of its type anywhere. Part of its appeal was its built-in "ballistic parachute," a unique safety device capable of lowering the entire airplane safely to the ground in case of disaster. The first successful "save" by this system in a Cirrus occurred in the fall of 2002, when a pilot took off from a small airport near Dallas in a Cirrus that had just been in for maintenance. A few minutes after takeoff, an aileron flopped loosely from one of the wings; investigators later determined that it had not been correctly reattached after maintenance. This made the plane impossible to control and in other circumstances would probably have led to a fatal crash. Instead the pilot pulled the handle to deploy the parachute, came down near a golf-course fairway, and walked away unharmed. The plane itself was repaired and later flown around the country by Cirrus as a promotional device for its safety systems.
On the tarmac in Changsha, on a Sunday evening as darkness fell, I sat in the Cirrus's right-hand front seat, traditionally the place for the copilot - or the flight instructor, during training flights. In the left-hand seat, usually the place for the pilot-in-command, sat Peter Claeys, a Belgian citizen and linguistic whiz whose job, from his sales base in Shanghai, was to persuade newly flush Chinese business tycoons that they should spend half a million U. S. dollars or more to buy a Cirrus plane of their own - even though there was as yet virtually no place in China where they would be allowed to fly it. I was there as a friend of Claeys's and because I was practically the only other person within a thousand miles who had experience as a pilot of the Cirrus. In one of the backseats was Walter Wang, a Chinese business journalist who, even more than Claeys and me, was happily innocent of the risks we were about to take.
We were headed to Zhuhai because every two years, in November, the vast military-scale runway and ramp areas of Zhuhai's Sanzao Airport become crammed with aircraft large and small that have flown in from around the world for the Zhuhai International Air Show, an Asian equivalent of the Paris Air Show. Zhuhai's main runway, commissioned by grand-thinking local officials without the blessing of the central government in Beijing, is more than 13, 000 feet long - longer than any at Heathrow or LAX. The rest of the facilities are on a similar scale, and during most of the year sit practically vacant. As long-term punishment by the Beijing authorities for the local government's ambitious overreach, the airport has been (as a local manager told me ruefully on a visit in 2011) "kept out of the aviation economy" that has brought booms to the surrounding airports in Hong Kong, Macau, Shenzhen, and Guangzhou.
But briefly every two years, every bit of its space is called into play. So many planes are present there's barely room to maneuver. Because nearly all of the twenty-first century's growth in the world's aviation market has been and is expected to be in Asia, with most of that in China, Zhuhai has become more and more important as the place for aerospace merchants and customers to